Why Being an SME is Becoming An Advantage, Not a Limitation
The Case for SMEs Like DMA Group as the FM Giants Get Bigger
The UK facilities management market is consolidating fast. Just this month, OCS agreed a £3.1 billion purchase of Mitie, creating a combined business with annual revenue of around £8.5 billion and more than 219,000 people worldwide. It’s the latest in a run of major FM mergers, and it won’t be the last. As the big players get bigger, they inevitably get further from the buildings and the people they serve.
That backdrop makes the results of this year’s i-FM Brands Survey worth a closer look, not just for what it says about the industry, but for what it says about where DMA sits within it.
What the survey found
When the i-FM Brand Survey results were first published, DMA Group didn’t appear in any of the top reporting segments, the published charts that show the top 12 brands per question. But we knew our profile had been rising at an exponential rate over the past two years, so we wanted to dig deeper into the full data rather than take the headline charts at face value. Thanks to David Emanuel and the team at i-FM.net for helping us look into DMA’s result in more detail.
The i-FM Brand Survey is an independent, open industry poll, this year drawing close to 1,000 responses and naming 447 different brands across eleven questions. DMA was named 11 times by four separate respondents, earning 16.6 weighted points and placing 37th of 447 brands overall, comfortably inside the top 10% of every brand mentioned.
What makes that result stand out isn’t the number itself. It’s where it came from. Every one of DMA’s points was unsolicited: no DMA Group employees were detected in the sample, no self-votes, no down-weighting required. DMA’s score is entirely independent endorsement. Two of the four respondents named DMA Group repeatedly, one across six different questions, which points to considered, informed recognition rather than a one-off mention.
The votes clustered on innovation and advancing the sector, categories i-FM links to substance rather than sheer visibility or spend. DMA also drew zero votes for “diminished profile”, a genuinely good result when several household names in the survey did not.
The context that makes this more significant, not less
DMA isn’t a national brand. We work primarily across London, Kent and the South East. We’re not spending on the marketing budgets, sponsorships or M&A activity that the largest names in this survey use to build visibility. And we’re doing this in an industry that is only getting more crowded and harder to be heard in, with AI now flattening a lot of the differentiation that used to come from content and channel presence alone.
Against that backdrop, being named and repeatedly recognised by senior, experienced FM professionals (three of DMA’s four respondents report 30 or more years in the industry) without ever asking for it is a meaningful signal. It suggests that recognition is being earned through delivery and reputation, not bought through reach.
What this means as the market consolidates further
Every large-scale FM merger changes the shape of the market for a period. Integration takes time. Account teams change. Systems get rationalised. Customers notice, and not always for good reasons.
That’s where the case for working with a focused, regionally-rooted specialist gets stronger, not weaker. Customers aren’t just buying a service standard, they’re buying continuity, a familiar account team, and a provider whose attention isn’t divided by a merger integration programme running in the background. The i-FM data suggests the market is starting to notice providers like DMA on those terms, even without a national footprint or the marketing muscle of the sector’s largest names.
We’ve got real work still to do to build wider awareness. But this year’s results, off the back of an independent industry survey, are a useful marker of where that recognition already stands.
Source: i-FM FM Brands Survey Report 2026, published July 2026.
